I turned the last page over and pushed it across the white tablecloth, past the cake, toward my daughter. It was two sheets stapled together, yellowed and soft, in the square blue handwriting of my late husband. “Read it out loud, Monique,” I said. She did not touch it. She had gone as pale as the icing. So Odile read it for her, in the clear alto voice that has carried the choir of St. Rose for fifty years. “Vange, if you are reading this, I am gone, and the sickness has not left her,” she began. “I have paid her debts since 2009. Here is every one. Do not give her cash. Do not let Brent near the money.”
Under the letter was a ledger, ruled by hand in pencil. Dates, amounts, casino names. Twelve thousand in March of 2009. Nineteen thousand in the fall of 2011. A line that read only, Boat engine sold, 28,000. When Odile read the total at the bottom, a murmur ran through the choir like wind through marsh grass. Two hundred eighteen thousand dollars, paid out by a shrimper over eleven years, in silence. Monique put both hands over her mouth. “Mama, I thought Daddy never knew,” she whispered. “He knew every single time, baby,” I said. “He just loved you more than he was angry.”
Brent shoved back his chair and looked around the hall, red faced and sweating, as if he might find an exit in the stained glass. “Evangeline, this is a family matter,” he said. “You are humiliating us in front of the whole church.” Odile looked at him over her glasses. “Brent, forty one withdrawals at an ATM in a casino at three in the morning is not a family matter,” she said. “It is a crime in Calcasieu Parish, and I believe it is one in Cameron too.” Somebody in the bass section stood up. Then the tenor beside him. Within a minute, the whole back row of the choir was on its feet, saying nothing, and that was enough.
A battered tackle box set beside a birthday cake gave one mother the weekend to bring her daughter back to the choir loft in Cameron Parish.
I gave my terms in front of the whole choir, with my hand on the cake knife. The nine point six million dollars from the fleet would go into the Remy Thibodeaux Trust, paid out by my lawyer in Lake Charles, and never again by cash. Brent would repay every forged withdrawal in monthly payments, and the bank would be told the truth about all forty one. Monique would enter a treatment program in Lafayette the very next Monday, for as long as the doctors required, and I would pay for it. And the forged life insurance loan of sixty thousand dollars would be set aside, with the papers of Remy as proof.
Monique slid out of her chair onto the floor of the church hall, and the white satin of her dress pooled around her like water. “Mama, I am so sorry,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.” I got down on my knees, which at seventy five is an undertaking, and I held her head against my shoulder. “Baby, I know,” I said. “I am not asking you to be sorry. I am asking you to be well.” The whole choir was crying now, the sopranos and the altos and even the old men in the back. Odile knelt on my other side and put her thin hand on my back, and none of us said anything for a long time.
Brent did not apologize. He stood up very slowly, put his napkin on the table and walked to the double doors of the hall. He turned once, as if to say something, and then he thought better of it. The deputy of the parish, who had been invited for the cake and had been quietly watching from beside the coffee urn, followed him out. I never learned what was said in the parking lot. I only know that Brent drove away that night in his own truck, and that the following week a lawyer from Lake Charles called my lawyer and asked, politely, what repayment terms would be acceptable.
On Monday morning, I drove my daughter to Lafayette myself. We took the old road along the marsh, past the oil rigs and the cattle egrets and the shrimp boats tied up in the bayou, and she looked out the window the whole way. Near Holly Beach, she asked me to stop. We stood together at the edge of the water. The Gulf was flat and gray, and a single pelican hung over it, perfectly still. “Mama, Daddy used to bring me here when I was little,” she said. “He said the water was the only thing he trusted.” I took her hand. “Then let us trust it a little,” I said.
The money consequences were slow and clear. The bank reversed seven of the withdrawals once the signatures were proven false, and the rest Brent repaid over eighteen months. The life insurance loan was voided. Monique completed ninety days in Lafayette and then moved into a small apartment near the church, working mornings at the parish library. On the first of every month, she left an envelope in my mailbox, with a few dollars and a slip of paper. On the slip, she wrote the date, the number of days since her last bet, and the words, I am trying, Mama.
In the name of Remy, who passed in 2020 and who kept a tackle box full of the secrets of his daughter and the love of her father, I started the Remy Tackle Box Fund. It pays for treatment, counseling and legal help for families in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes whose loved ones are caught in gambling and who are quietly paying the price. In the first year, we helped thirty six families. A shrimper of sixty, sitting in the office with his cap in his hands, said, “I thought I was the only father in Louisiana who did this. Thank you for telling me I am not.”
On the first Friday of the next Lent, we fried shrimp in the church hall, whether we had caught any or not. Monique stood at the end of the line in an apron, handing out paper plates. Odile was beside her, and the two of them were arguing happily about the proper amount of cayenne. Later, the choir gathered by the old upright piano to practice for Easter, and I stood in my place among the sopranos. Monique slipped into the alto section, shy as a girl, and found her note. I closed my eyes and listened, and for a moment I heard Remy in the room.
